October 2008 Archives

One of the greatest fear of the journalist is to suddenly find yourself in a headlock under the long arm of the law.

We are happy to sit smugly in the court press box with our notepads, watching a procession of the criminal underclass get their comeuppance. But the moment it is even suggested our seat could be shifted to the dock while an unhappy restaurant owner's lawyer draws big red circles around errors in your copy, we suddenly develop a fearsome aversion to the entire judicial process.

The smallest mistake or improper suggestion can cost a publication hundreds of thousands of pounds in libel damages (for a recent example see everyone's favourite orgy-lover Max Mosley - just don't mention the war).

So how do we avoid being dragged through the courts by outraged celebs and business owners? The simplest answer, and one I subscribe to where possible, is don't make stuff up. If you can't verify something then don't print it, simple. Not only does it save you a small fortune in lawyers' fees, but it will also mean your publication maintains a reputation for accurate and truthful news.

But what if you hear something that is an absolute dynamite story, but you can't prove it? The day was (and I wasn't actually in journalism on this day, but I've heard talk) when such a story would be dropped and the journalist would return to his desk (there were no female reporters on that day - it was a man's world), head hung, to begin work on a story about how some crackpot scientist has predicted people will be able to carry phones around with them in the future.

Then some forward-thinking hack, a journalistic Einstein, one who undoubtedly is among the few figures of our generation to earn the epithet 'genius', came up with a solution which would save us ever having to worry about nasty old libel again. This divine device is known by many names but seems to most commonly appear under the title 'wicked whispers'.

You know the type of thing I'm talking about - short pieces that start with things like 'which boyband member...' or 'which soap star...' and go on to detail some outrageous celebrity behaviour which, if directly attributed to an individual would see the publication up before the bar faster than you can say "massive out of court settlement."

But have no fear loveable tabloid editors. For with no identification there can be no libel and the company lawyers can remain happily in their offices focusing on ways to lay off employees without the costly bother of a redundancy payout.

Of course there is one potential snag in this otherwise infallible device, and I feel like a ghastly pedant in even mentioning it, but if the story doesn't identify anyone and is therefore not traceable to any source couldn't it just be made up? Just a thought.

Who is interesting?

It's a good rule of thumb that things which have to be introduced as interesting are normally incredibly dull. The conversational gambit of "Interesting story..." is nearly always a prelude to a tale guaranteed to have similar sedative effects to drinking a litre of absinthe while wrapped in a kingsize duvet.

But therein lies the rub - the narrator clearly feels the story is interesting enough not only to recount, but to actually flag up the fact at the beginning. Who am I to say that a detailed explanation of how the protagonist cleverly avoided heavy traffic on the M1 last Sunday by driving on 'a little detour he knows' is dull? How can I say that my standards are correct when I will happily spend an evening discussing which is Brian Wilson's best Beach Boys composition?

Normally what we find interesting and what we don't does nothing more than govern the lengths we're willing to go to to avoid ending up stuck chatting to a man called Fotherington, about the impact of the credit crunch on overseas investment accounts. But as a journalist we have to decide what we think will be interesting for other people because, after all, if they are not interested in what we write they simply won't read it.

The interests of the readership will dictate the order in which stories are published in a paper, which to an outsider can seem totally illogical. For example, the average person across the UK is probably more likely to be interested to read about someone being mugged by hoodies than flats being built in Harrow town centre, but if you consider our readership there really is no competition as to which would make the front page (unless the mugging victim is someone famous such as Pat Sharp).

So as a newspaper survival is absolutely dependent on knowing who your readers are and what they are interested in. It is with this in mind that many national newspapers are beginning to make me really despair over the state of the national psyche.

The best example of this recently was in one of the free commuter papers a couple of days ago (I can't remember which, but it was probably in all of them anyway) which dedicated an entire half page to a photograph of David Walliams chatting to Jude Law after the pair bumped into each other on the street. There was no mention of what the two were actually talking about, we were just supposed to be unquestioningly interested in the occurrence of the event itself.

Now as far as I can see there are three possible explanations for this sort of news:

- Celebrities have developed different metabolisms to the rest of us mere mortals and they must constantly be in the public eye or they will shrink and grow antlers.

- The general public are genuinely interested in the minutia of the lives of people, some of whom are merely famous for being famous, and however inane, pointless or inconsequential their activities the average reader will lap it up with gay abandon.

- The British press has become so patronising and caught up in itself it believes the above to be true.

Sad as it is I sincerely hope it is the third option which is true and not the second, as this would truly be a miserable indictment of our society.

I'm not saying I'm above reading celebrity news, I obviously looked at the picture of Walliams and Law, but I could think of at least ten news stories that day which I found a lot more interesting and which could easily have been put in its place.

Anyway, if you've read this far thanks, I hope you've found it interesting and just so you know - my vote goes for God Only Knows every time.

I quite like commuting.

Before you start thinking that I have a weird thing about standing for hours on a platform watching train after train be cancelled, or being rammed into an out-dated train carriage and forced to stand with my face in the armpit of a man who smells like he spent the previous evening wrestling weasels on the floor of an illegal moonshine still, let me clarify.

The good point of commuting is the little bookends it offers at the beginning and end of each working day, a moment to get your head together and read, in the company of a multitude of bizarre passengers who you can surreptitiously peer at over the pages of the terribly intellectual book you're holding open in an attempt to make the less weird ones believe you are clever and interesting.

This morning however, a surprise awaited me upon boarding my train. I was in search of commuting gold - a completely empty four-seat section, you know, the kind where two seats face two others and if you get there first you can lay claim to the best leg room.

As I walked up the carriage my path was blocked by another man, clearly on the same hunt, and we pushed forward to the very front of the train, where we had to make do with opposite sides of the same booth.

I think my brain must have just registered the man as just another tired commuter in a suit and I looked up with only mild interest when he started fiddling with a device that I assume was a portable DVD player.

It was then that it struck me - this was no ordinary Jo Schmo commuter, but a chap I had known at school, who had even been in the same tutor group as me. He seemed deeply engrossed in the screen of his DVD device with a pair of blue earphones embedded in his ears and, as I confirmed with myself that this was definitely the chap who had tripped in a gravel-lined car park while on a school trip only to have us squirt the ensuing wound on his arm clean with a barrage from the barrels of our newly-acquired Supersoakers, I realised the full gravity of the situation.

The problem was an unusual one which I have only encountered a couple of times in the last few years - how do you instantly convert a relationship from school life to adulthood?

Now this chaps surname was Bettesworth, but as a result of the imaginative and humourous nature of odious Lynx-wearing, acned youths he was known as 'Betty'. At school there is always a complex social ladder, with the most popular at the top surrounded by the usual swarm of sycophants a couple of rungs below. Bettesworth, I think it is fair to say, occupied the lower rung of this ladder, along with the likes of Stinkey Sturmey and Chilly Chilvers.

Now looking back on it there was no reason for this - Bettesworth (even now I have the instinct to type 'Betty') was one of the nicest people you could even meet, but of course that is often reason enough for teenagers.

It is at this point that I could quite easily rewrite history and say that I gallantly braved the scorn of my contemporaries and stood up for Bettesworth when the spotlight was turned upon him by the crueler of my year. But truth be told I laughed along with the others. I was only one rung above him, having climbed from the bottom of the social ladder between middle school and secondary and, as is one of the unfortunate truths of life governed by the very laws of gravity itself, faeces falls down.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't steal his lunch money or push him down a well, and we got on pretty well. But sometimes you can be just as cruel purely by joining the pack in casually referring to someone every day as Betty, even if you have convinced yourself it is a light-hearted joke in which he shares.

So there it is, that was school and that is how it probably is for all generations, but now here I was today, sat on a train opposite 'Betty', both of us on our way to work in adult jobs, wearing adult clothes and living in an adult world.

A few months back Bettesworth added me as a friend on Facebook and I happily accepted, but now he was right there in front of me the actual prospect of having to engage in conversation seemed a lot less appealing.

Everyone knows those awful conversations with people you had never expected to see again.

"Soooo, how are you? What have you being doing these past ten years? Hasn't the weather suddenly changed?"

Then it would all descend into the depressing world of grown-up conversation, talking about credit crunches and mortgages and other things that make me want to pull my tongue out through my eyes. All it would take is one accidental look of acknowledgment and we would be riding the awkward train to destination 'we really must meet up for a drink some time.'

Then I realised something - he wasn't just naturally engrossed in his DVD player, he actually hadn't looked up from it at all in the last ten minutes. If a party of ninjas had chased a raptor onto the train Bettesworth would not have known about it until he was run through with a katana. He was pretending not to have seen me!

So there it was, we were going to be terribly British about the whole thing - both pretending we could not see a man sat facing us less than a metre away for an entire 40 minute train journey (this became particularly difficult when at one stage I picked up the strains of 'It's Raining Men' spilling out of his tinny earphones, best case scenario - being used ironically to soundtrack a comedy movie).

In the end it worked and I got off at Clapham Junction to seek out a more packed train where I could take refuge in the enclave of a stranger's armpit.

I'm sure there's a lesson here somewhere, but if there is I didn't spot it. Then again we don't have to learn from everything that happens do we?